Legends of the Bastille. Frantz Funck-Brentano
regiment on the Place Vendôme, where it came into collision with the “demonstration”—as we should say to-day—which was displaying busts of Necker and the Duke of Orleans, and dispersed it.
At six o’clock, a march of the same horse soldiers to the swinging-bridge of the Tuileries, where they had five or six chairs thrown at their head; and the massacre, by M. de Lambesc, of the legendary grey-beard who, an hour after, was describing his tragic end at the Palais-Royal!
At nine o’clock, a military promenade of the same regiment along the boulevards. A volley from the Gardes Françaises slew two of their number, and the regiment beat a retreat without returning fire, to the great surprise of M. de Maleissye, officer of the Guards. For, by his own confession, if the cavalry had charged, it would easily have routed the Gardes Françaises “in the state of drunkenness in which they then were.”
And Besenval, terrified at such a resistance, assembled all his troops, shut himself up with them in the Champ de Mars, and did not move another step!
We ask ourselves, “Was he a fool? or was he a traitor?” He was a fool, for he thought he had “three hundred thousand men” in front of him, took every excited person for a rebel, and did not understand that out of every hundred Parisians there were ninety who were relying on him to bring the mutineers to reason.
He had no confidence in his troops, he said.
It was rather for them to have no confidence in him, and to lose heart utterly at such a spectacle of cowardice. But he was slandering them. One solitary regiment showed disloyalty. And if he had only given the Swiss the word to march, their conduct on August 10 gives ample proof that they could have been depended on.
“And then,” says he again, “I was fearful of letting loose civil war!”
Indeed! And so a soldier going to suppress a revolt is not to run the risk of fighting!
Last reason of all: “I requested orders from Versailles—and did not get them!”
What, then, had he in his pocket?
Finally, after having sent word to Flesselles and De Launey to maintain their position till he arrived, and after having allowed the arms of the Invalides to be looted under his eyes without a single effort to save them, he waited till the Bastille was taken before making up his mind to leave the Champ de Mars, and to return quietly to Versailles with his 35,000 men, who had not fired a shot!
Ah! those were the days for rioting!
“On July 13,” says Michelet, “Paris was defending herself.” (Against whom?) “On the 14th, she attacked! A voice wakened her and cried, ‘On, and take the Bastille!’ And that day was the day of the entire People!”
Admirable poetry; but every word a lie!
Listen to Marat, who is not open to suspicion, and who saw things at closer quarters. “The Bastille, badly defended, was captured by a handful of soldiers and a gang of wretches for the most part Germans and provincials. The Parisians, those everlasting star-gazers, came there out of curiosity!”
In reality, Michelet’s “entire people” reduces itself to a bare thousand assailants, of whom three hundred at most took part in the fight: Gardes Françaises and deserters of all arms, lawyers’ clerks, and citizens who had lost their heads: fine fellows who thought themselves engaged in meritorious work in rushing on these inoffensive walls; bandits attracted by the riot which promised them theft and murder with impunity. And a number of mere spectators—spectators above all!
“I was present,” says Chancellor Pasquier, “at the taking of the Bastille. What is called the fight was not serious. The resistance was absolutely nil. The truth is, that this grand fight did not cause an instant’s alarm to the spectators, who had flocked up to see the result. Among them there were many ladies of the greatest elegance. In order to get more easily to the front they had left their carriages at a distance. By my side was Mdlle. Contat, of the Comédie Française. We stayed to see the finish, and then I escorted her on my arm to her carriage in the Place Royale.”
“The Bastille was not taken; truth must be told, it surrendered.” It is Michelet himself who makes this statement, and he adds: “what ruined it was its own evil conscience!”
It would be too simple to acknowledge that it was the incapacity of its governor.
There is no connoisseur in old prints but is acquainted with those last-century views which represent the taking of the Bastille. The platform of the fortress bristles with cannon all firing together, “belching forth death,”—without the slightest attention on the part of the assailants, for all the balls from this artillery, passing over their heads, would only kill inoffensive wayfarers without so much as scratching a single one of the besiegers!
And the Bastille did not fire a single shot in self-defence!
In the morning, at the request of Thuriot de la Rozière, De Launey had readily consented to the withdrawal of the fifteen cannon of the platform from their embrasures, and had blocked up the embrasures with planks. Of the three guns which later on he ranged batterywise before the entrance gate, not one was effective, and the discharge attributed to one of them came from a piece of ordnance on the wall.
He placed such absolute reliance on succour from Besenval that, on evacuating the arsenal and getting the whole garrison together into the Bastille—eighty-two Invalides and M. de Flue’s thirty-two Swiss—he had forgotten to increase his stock of provisions. Now, the Bastille had no reserve of provisions. Every morning, like a good housewife, it received the goods ordered the night before, brought by the different purveyors; on this day, they were intercepted. So it happened that at three o’clock in the afternoon the garrison was without its usual rations, and the Invalides, who had been for a week past going in and out of all the inns in the neighbourhood, and were disposed to open the doors to their good friends of the suburbs, used the scantiness of their rations as a pretext for mutiny, for refusing to fight, and for muddling the brains, never very clear, of the unhappy De Launey.
“On the day of my arrival,” says De Flue, “I was able to take this man’s measure from the absolutely imbecile preparations which he made for the defence of his position. I saw clearly that we should be very poorly led in case of attack. He was so struck with terror at the idea of it that, when night came on, he took the shadows of trees for enemies! Incapable, irresolute, devoting all his attention to trifles and neglecting important duties—such was the man.”
Abandoned by Besenval, instead of cowing his Invalides into obedience by his energy, and maintaining his position to famishing point behind walls over which the balls of the besiegers flew without killing more than one man, De Launey lost his head, made a feint of firing the powder magazine, capitulated, and opened his gates to men who, as Chateaubriand says, “could never have cleared them if he had only kept them shut.”
If this poor creature had done his duty, and Besenval had done his, things would have had quite a different complexion. That is not to say that the Revolution would have been averted—far from it! The Revolution was legitimate, desirable, and, under the generous impulse of a whole nation, irresistible. But it would have followed another bent, and would have triumphed at a slighter cost, with less ruin and less bloodshed. The consequences of the 14th of July were disastrous. The mere words, “The Bastille is taken!” were the signal for the most frightful disorders throughout France. It seemed as though those old walls were dragging down with them in their fall all authority, all respect, all discipline; as though the floodgates were being opened to every kind of excess. Peasants went about in bands, ravaging, pillaging, firing the châteaux, the burghers’ houses, and burning alive those who fell into their hands. The soldiers mutinied, insulted their chiefs, and fell to carousing with the malefactors whom they set free. There was not a town or village where the mob did not put on menacing airs, where decent people were not molested by the brawlers of the clubs and the street-corners. Such violence led to a rapid reaction, and there were numerous defections—of men who, on the very eve of the outbreak, among the magistracy, the army, the clergy, the nobility, though sympathizing with the new ideas, abruptly cut themselves loose from the movement, like the good Duke de la Rochefoucauld,